He turned the switch and the dials all clicked to zero. The needles found dead center. The song of power died out in the ship and there was the olden silence—the silence of long ago, of the time when the stars were streaks and the walls were floors.
Then they heard the sound.
The sound of human wailing—as an animal might howl.
"They are afraid," said Mary. "They are scared to death. They won't leave the Ship."
And she was right, he knew. That was something that he had not thought of—that they would not leave the ship.
They had been tied to it for many generations. They had looked to it for shelter and security. To them the vastness of the world outside, the never-ending sky, the lack of a boundary of any sort at all, would be sodden terror.
Somehow or other they would have to be driven from the ship—literally driven from it, and the ship locked tight so they could not fight their way back in again.
For the ship was ignorance and cowering; it was a shell outgrown; it was the womb from which the race would be born anew.
Mary asked: "What will they do to us? I never thought of that. We can't hide from them, nor . . ."
"Not anything," said Jon. "They won't do anything. Not while I have this."